Digital TV - what a joke
 

I bought a digital TV (it's a Toshiba 20") to go with my new office. Purely to keep clients' kids entertained, y'understand!!

Well there was no aerial, so I bought an indoor thing (£30) - it didn't work. So eventually after doing a Statue of Liberty pose I got the damn thing to work, but the TV was practically on the ceiling.

So got my friendly aerial engineer out to put an aerial on the roof (landlord says OK) and friendly aerial engineer says that the signal in Shrews town centre is too weak as there's no direct line to The Wrekin. So the only choice is to instal a Sky dish with Sky Max. Oh great.

So the flatscreen TV is coming home and I'll replace it with a non digi thing and a Skybox.

And the government is going to switch off the analogue system over the next few years - so if you're in a town centre where reception is poor you have no choice but to go satellite.

[Picks up phone to stockbroker to buy shares in Sky]

Oh yeah, huge sections of the population are completely screwed if they don't live in the flatlands. No chance of digital in the valleys, you gotta stump for a sky system. Not extortionate per se but a cost nevertheless. I think it should be subsidised to some extent by the licence fee I believe.

Freesat?

Wossat?

Get sky installed then you can get the minimum package: bbc1, bbc2, itv, 4 and 5 plus loads of other crappy channels like u get on freeview. Costs you flip all :P

you have to pay a sky contract for 12months tho :?
i had a freeview aerial put up £70 and its still rubbish so i got sky anyway.

...unless you pay the full installation fee i think...loads of money tho

surely the government is gonna have to improve things soon. i'm lucky and get pretty good signal. i have freeview running off a powered booster aereal in my attic

trouble is with sky they have got you trapped :?

Re: Digital TV - what a joke
 

Once all of the analogue signals are turned off the digital channels will improve with greater power to the signal, different wave bands and more use of bandwidth.

Essentially a power boost so everyone can receive it.

I dont know the percentages, but just to pose an example. The current 5 terrestrial channels use 85% of the tv bandwidth while the 85 or so digital ones use 15%.

I can probably get you a good deal on Sky at the moment :D

But if you just want a bit of TV to 'entertain' waiting clients, Freesat might be worth looking it:
http://www.freesatfromsky.co.uk/